Exactly - the digital business demands a comprehensive and integrated e-commerce/O2O/B2C/B2B platform instead of product/solution in silo. So the knowledge about system integration and process is of importance. Nowadays e-business is not a value-adding part but something essential to succeed in the market.

Digital business will increase the demand for deep development, software engineering, and architecture expertise.

And don't forget about systems integration. The experience of the customer and the details of their interactions must flow across the mobile, web, desktop, back office and any other spaces. The internally disjointed company with strict silos will fail in the digital business world.

I hear a lot of CIOs pining for good, ol' hard-core software engineering skills. They're not tech companies, but they're trying to build software systems or software-driven customer experiences that don't exist off the shelf. Digital business will increase the demand for deep development, software engineering, and architecture expertise.

From a customer engagement angle, the success to winning with a digital focus, is first having the skills to map the processes of customer journey, and then enable with the technology.

If there's been a heavy reliance upon agencies to map the journey/solution, it's possible for in-house marketing departments to cover-up their own lack of knowledge on mapping the ideal process, and no need to build experience on how to deliver an engagement and revenue generation plan.

Now that the capability and pricing structures of CX tools, including marketing automation, social monitoring & engagement and traditional CRM systems, are rapidly increasing the uptake by the end user companies, rather than agencies, the focus of skills needs to be process first. This will in turn make adoption of technologies far easier, as they are seen as enablers, with relevance, rather than hard to use tools, forcing mis-understood processes.

Marketing department must be indebted to the unstoppable obsession around "digital strategy". Given that no business leader in an organization consider marketing to be of any value, the new digital toys are giving market a new lease of life to prove their existence and value to the organization. However, like most marketing folks, who are loud mouth and removed from reality, all this digital jazz will be of no use. Only those marketers who really understand and are willing to put their skin in the game and collaborate with different internal departments will succeed. Moreover, successful companies will create digital strategies as an extension of their customer focus. Whereas the laggards will keep cribbing about how their IT department is not helping them improve customer experience and will put that as the sole reason for the bad performance of a company.

Forrester's take on data analysis echoes what we heard from Weather Company CIO Bryson Koehler at the InformationWeek Conference. Not everyone must be a data scientist. Hire curious people who can learn data analysis skills.

As InformationWeek Government readers were busy firming up their fiscal year 2015 budgets, we asked them to rate more than 30 IT initiatives in terms of importance and current leadership focus. No surprise, among more than 30 options, security is No. 1. After that, things get less predictable.